(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display, and in particular, to a panel for the liquid crystal display.
(b) Description of Related Art
Generally, a liquid crystal display (LCD) includes a liquid crystal (LC) panel assembly including two panels provided with two kinds of field generating electrodes such as pixel electrodes and a common electrode and a LC layer with dielectric anisotropy interposed therebetween. The variation of the voltage difference between the field generating electrodes, i.e., the variation in the strength of an electric field generated by the electrodes changes the transmittance of the light passing through the LCD, and thus desired images are obtained by controlling the voltage difference between the electrodes.
However, the LCD involves a critical shortcoming of the narrow viewing angle. In order to overcome such a problem, various techniques for widen the viewing angle have been developed, and among them, a technique of forming cutouts or protrusions at the pixel electrodes and the common electrode while aligning the LC molecules vertical to the upper and lower panels is the strongest candidate for the wide viewing angle technique.
The cutouts provided at the respective pixel electrodes and the common electrode generate fringe fields, which control the tilt directions of the LC molecules are controlled to thereby widen the viewing angle.
The protrusions provided on the respective pixel electrodes and the common electrode deform the electric field, and the tilt directions of the LC molecules are controlled due to the deformed electric field to thereby widen the viewing angle.
Alternatively, the cutouts are provided at the pixel electrodes of a lower panel while protrusions are provided at the common electrode of an upper panel. Fringe fields generated by the cutouts and the protrusions controls the tilt directions of the LC molecules to thereby form multiple domains.
The multi-domain LCD involves a very excellent contrast-based viewing angle or gray inversion-based viewing angle of up to 80° or more in all directions. The contrast-based viewing angle is defined as a viewing angle showing the contrast ratio of 1:10, and the gray inversion-based viewing angle is defined by the limit angle of the inter-gray luminance inversion. However, the multi-domain LCD shows a lateral gamma curve distortion that the front gamma curve and the lateral gamma curve do not agree to each other is made to exhibit deteriorated left and right visibility even compared with the twisted nematic (TN) mode LCD. For instance, the patterned vertically aligned (PVA) mode LCD having cutouts for partitioning domains becomes brighter and color-shifts to white as it goes to the lateral sides. In a serious case, the difference between the bright grays is eradicated, and hence, the images become conglomerated. However, it becomes a critical matter to improve the visibility more and more as the LCD has been recently used for the multimedia purpose to display still or moving picture images.